


Shallows

by thejollysailor



Series: Fathoms [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: All pairings are hypothetical, Arranged Marriage, But they are seriously contemplated, Courtship, F/M, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:36:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29989185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thejollysailor/pseuds/thejollysailor
Summary: They are hallway through Spring when her advisors decides that she should marry.
Relationships: Dornish Prince (Game of Thrones s08e06)/Sansa Stark, Jon Snow/Sansa Stark, Robin Arryn/Sansa Stark, Sansa Stark/Edmure Tully, Sansa Stark/Original Male Character(s)
Series: Fathoms [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2205951
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Shallows

308 AC They are hallway through Spring when her advisors decides that she should marry.

It is not the first time they do so, but it is the first time she doesn’t outright disagree and so, for the first time in three years, she let’s them bring out the scrolls from the suitors that they have apparently been sitting on for many moons, hatching each their candidates like hens.

There is one from her cousin Robin, eager and disinterested at the same time and she dismisses it as once, citing Robin’s own responsibilities as Lord of the Vale as her reason but secretly thanks the Gods for her own good birds in the Eyre who tell her of her young cousins many mistresses and his attention to their bosoms and promises herself that while she had married a half-man and a monster, she would never marry a man who was still a boy at heart and would remain so till he was fifty. Lord Royce’s ever-persistent frown seems deeper for a week at least.  
  
The next is as impossible logistically as the first but not as unappealing.  
Alessander Martell sends his suit along with a whole crate of lemons and the attached letter promises sweetness of another kind. She rereads the letter over and over the next few days before her advisors reminds her what a marriage to an independent monarch would bring Martell himself; ever closer to the promise of independence and Sansa could slap herself for not realizing it. For he would have succeeded, this dusky dornishman, once he was in her bed and her heart, once his child was in her belly, because though she is older and wiser Sansa is ever a romantic and how could she have refused her lord husband if he came to her and asked her fealty in securing the independence, she had won for herself? She would betray her own brother with a marriage like that and so she sends a refusal and gorges herself on lemon cakes for a week after.  
  
The third is the closest she comes to accepting. Her uncle Edmure’s wife, the poor lady Roslyn who was once meant for her own brother Robb before he decided to lose his own life and his kingdom for some Volantene, had died. And though he was in no need of an heir, he did not see any reason to waste his life away as a widower, and what better bride for the lord of the most strategic kingdom in the Six than the Queen of the North? At first, Sansa dismisses the proposal with a laugh, as some jape meant at the expense of her dearly, nearly departed cousin and the woman who was both his aunt and his lover. But then Maester Wolkan points out that the last Sansa to grace the Stark family tree had indeed married her own uncle (Jonnel, was his name, and Sansa does really laugh at that, at what might have been, if her father had brought home Jon, not as their brother but as their cousin, perhaps as Uncle Brandon’s bastard or if he had only told the truth from the start. Would she have been betrothed to Jon, if her father had worked for his nephews right to the throne and not his friends? An eagle once tried to prick Jon’s eye out, she remembers. She lies awake a whole night thinking about what might have been). In the end, she refuses but not before spending nearly a moon contemplating it, thinking of family and duty and honour. She even has her uncle travel to Winterfell so that she can at least tell him in person, and she gives him a pitiful kiss as she tells him that it wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interest if they married. She later learns that Tyrion’s managed to push one of his least awful cousins onto him and dutifully sends presents for the frequent births of their strawberry blonde children.  
  
The fourth is a nuisance, not only because he turns up in person and more because he is the nephew of Lord Manderly who just happens to be her least favourite member of her council because of his consistent whining about port taxes.  
From the moment he arrives in Winterfell (on horse, no company but his groom, luggage to arrive later) she is ready to dismiss him, if only because this one suitor is actually a thorn in her heel unlike the rest of them whose only faults were being too attached to the breast, too attached to their dream of independence or too close on the family tree. But they never actually came to her home, unless invited which, apart from her uncle Edmure, they never were.

But Willem Manderly strolls into Winterfell like he owns the place. He greets her like a common sailor by taking her hand and not even kissing it. He slurps loudly at the soup course and he sings along loudly when the garrison starts singing. Sansa wouldn’t be so annoyed by him if he was just another highborn guardsman whom she would be expected to tolerate at high table for a night before he would take his place with the other members of the household. But the Manderly’s expecting to be elevated to royalty by sending her this?

And then his luggage arrives. She first learns of his talents one evening that she has been delayed to dinner by a meeting with the representatives of Wintertown. She walks through the hallways, adjusting her sleeves when suddenly, she hears a sound which almost brings her to her knees, a sound which she haven’t heard in these very halls since she was a girl. Though she wants to cry (“there’ll be more singers in Kings Landing, sweetheart, I’ll even find you a bell-master”) she pulls herself together and steps into the hall.  
And of course, he is there, sitting with his lute, cross-legged at high table and oh, he reminds her of Arya in his willful dismissal of all courtesies. She allows herself to cry as he plays. And days later, as he sits in his window and the spring snow falls, he plays a tune on the flute that he also masters and she sheds her layers and dances in the sunrise and they look each other in the eye and she knows, **knows**.  
  
She should tell her council first, but she doesn’t.  
  
They meet each other in the Godswood. It is more awkward than what she would have thought, but then again nothing in her life has been ideal so why would this be? He is sitting there amongst the trees, again cross-legged and she hates herself for pointing out if it is a habit. He only laughs and says that he spent quite a lot of time mending sails and nets when he was at sea and that this is a comfortable position. And she almost laughs because of course she would end up with someone who was as good as she was at mending things.  
As she draws closer, he stands up and looks so uncertain that she almost thinks him unwilling. But then he reaches out for her and grasps her with such a force that she is surprised.  
“Sansa,” he says and she’s never heard her name being said in that tone before and she almost doesn’t care even if he was just a trap of honey, she would want him nonetheless if only for a moment, and he is so close…  
  
She looks at him then, his blonde hair, his green eyes. She had loved a boy that looked like that once, but he had been vain and cruel.  
**No** , she thought, **he is not Joffrey**. His hair is not the ruddy brightness of gold but the muddy sand of the beaches of the Shivering Sea. His eyes are not the sickening green gleam of Wildfire but the frothy pale of sea foam. **And they are kind** , she thinks. **And honest too. They couldn’t lie to me, those eyes**. She reaches out and threads her fingers through his: the tips of his fingers are tough, and she recalls that he prefers axes and the bow to the sword. She had loved an archer too, once.  
**And I am no longer the prey**. She had her answer then; she is resolved. She stands up on the tips of her toes and presses her lips to his. They are soft and willing and tasts faintly like salt, not like the tears she had licked from her own all too often but like the sea, like something wide and wild and unfathomably deep. It was the first time she had had a kiss that did not taste of treachery or duty or horror.  
**My first** , she decides then, **my first proper kiss**. His hands are on her waist, encircling it, pulling her taut against him but she is not frightened. She allows it, leans into his touch, opening herself to him.  
  
She is kissing a man and she is no longer afraid.


End file.
